A Brief Introduction to Lua
by Drew Ditthardt, member of the Bay Area Lua Developers meetup. A demo-based minimal crash course.

How Lua improves Wikipedia

by Rob Lanphier, Tim Starling (remote) and Brad Jorsch (remote). See to believe! Examples of bizarre wikitext based templates used in thousands of Wikipedia articles, solved in few lines of Lua code.

Background

Most Wikipedia pages use templates written with wikitext syntax, from citation of references to infoboxes. In fact there are thousands of templates available and many of them are pretty pretty smart. But writing smart templates is hard, and many times they come with performance penalties.

Lua support simplifies the development of templates and increases significantly the performance of page rendering. Using a standard programming language for templating opens the door to many more possibilities. Add to the mix the ongoing deployment of Wikidata as a means to convert plain content into semantic data. Can you see the potential?

A meetup consisting of casual evening talks and demos on the challenges and solutions of building and maintaining Wikipedia and associated sites (Wikimedia Commons, Wiktionary, Wikiquotes, …) at the scale of a top five Internet site with over half a billion monthly uniques. This will be followed by Q&A and other informal lively discussion before and after. This consists of a range of topics such as the MediaWiki software (one of the largest open source web projects), website architecture and infrastructure, mobile devices, product design, internationalization and localization, fundraising engineering, new features engineering, and operational and testing infrastructure. The Wikimedia Foundation is headquartered in San Francisco, so it likely that the majority of presentations will be done there. Though it is likely that the presentations themselves will be streamed over the web. Join this if you are interested in web development (especially, but not exclusively, in PHP and JS), mobile web and app development, devops, mobile development, product design & development as well as open source outreach and development.